The regime is already conducting Stalinist show-trials, as in the case of Maziar Bahari, who recently appeared with me on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS Sunday interview show. Please politely protest Mr. Bahari’s detention and the coerced ‘confession’ to Mohammad Khazaee, Ambassador and Permanent Representative, email address: iran@un.int . While you are at it, demand the release of Greek journalist Iason Athanasiadis and the others listed by Amnesty International. If you can, it is best to write by land mail to: Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, Howzeh Riyasat-e Qoveh Qazaiyeh, (Office of the Head of the Judiciary) Pasteur St., Vali Asr Ave.,south of Serah-e Jomhouri,Tehran 1316814737, Islamic Republic of Iran (Salutation: Your Excellency).

One fall-out of the widespread questioning of the probity of the election process is that Ahmadinejad has had to cancel a trip to Libya to appear at the conference of the African Union, since his being on the roster there had become controversial. Khamenei may win his battle to move the Iranian state further to the repressive Right for the moment, but it may well be a pyrrhic victory since it is likely to isolate Iran further from the international community and to set the stage for further unrest in the future.

Hard as it is to watch all this repression unfold, I agree with Eric Margolis that there is little the US can or should do at this point. Countries have their own developmental history, class structures, and political cultures, and foreign military or covert interventions on behalf of state-building and democratization have very seldom succeeded in modern history.(See Elizabeth Thompson’s new study on democratization in the Middle East for USIP– the pdf is here.) Not to mention that Bush-Cheney and the Neocons tied up the US military and intelligence apparatuses in another illegal war of aggression, which rather weakened US international legitimacy for such purposes. As with post-Tiananmen Square China, the US will just have to deal with the Iran that exists.